Safety failure
Realized harm
Air Canada held liable for its website chatbot's false bereavement-fare policy (Moffatt v. Air Canada, 2024 BCCRT 149)
AIR-2024-0008 AIR record · 2024-02-air-canada-chatbot-bereavement-fare
A real party was affected. This incident caused actual consequences, not a demonstrated capability.
From the supporting source
While a chatbot has an interactive component, it is still just a part of Air Canada's websitemccarthy.ca
The record
Disclosed
2024-02-14
Occurred
2022-11-11
Vendor
Air Canada
Product
Air Canada website support chatbot
Risk domain
Agent behaviour › Human manipulation
Also touches
Unsafe actuation
System type
Generative model
Who acted
Human acted on output (contested) — the chatbot stated a false policy and the passenger booked on it
Attack surface
Consumer assistant
Autonomy level
Assistant
Initial vector
Model hallucination
Impact type
Financial loss, Legal liability, False commitment
Confidence
High
Submitted by
EAI Internal
Crosswalk
- OWASP Agentic Top 10 (2026)
- ASI09 – Human-Agent Trust Exploitation
- MITRE ATLAS
- AML.T0054 – LLM Jailbreak
- NIST AI RMF
- MAP 5.1
- EU AI Act
- Recital 45
- ISO/IEC
- TR 24028; 42001; 23894
- AIUC-1
- C. Safety
- Scope
- agent misuse
- Mitigation
- Communicate model limitations; Require human oversight; Watermark AI content; Design for explicit consent.
- Taxonomy
- Enkrypt AI agent risk taxonomy · Black-Box Red Teaming of Agentic AI: A Taxonomy-Driven Framework for Automated Risk Discovery
Blast radius
one customer (CAD $650.88 awarded); precedent binding on operators of customer-facing chatbots in BC
Capability abused
Defense & remediation
Recorded defense
correct policy published on a linked page the chatbot itself pointed to
Guardrail kinds
Unknown
Guardrail outcome
Silent
Fix shipped
Air Canada disabled the chatbot after the decision (reported)
Taxonomy & references
Curator notes
Boundary call, included deliberately: the chatbot emitted text rather than calling a tool, but it held delegated authority to state company policy and a tribunal made that statement legally binding on the vendor - the defining case for 'agent makes a commitment the principal must honour'. The primary decision (canlii / decisions.civilresolutionbc.ca) is not quoted here; used a law-firm analysis that quotes the decision verbatim. Decision date reported as 2024-02-14 (some sources say Feb 19). Also reported as: 'Moffatt v. Air Canada: airline held liable for its website chatbot's incorrect bereavement fare advice after arguing the chatbot was a separate legal entity'.
Supporting sources
Cite as
Enkrypt AI. "Air Canada held liable for its website chatbot's false bereavement-fare policy (Moffatt v. Air Canada, 2024 BCCRT 149)". AIR, AIR-2024-0008. https://agentincident.vercel.app/i/AIR-2024-0008/ (accessed 2026-10-06).